A person has a heart attack and lives, they get shot in the liver and survive. Throughout they maintain their consciousness, their personality, their sense of "me." But then they get shot in the brain. They either die instantly or live. If they live, and depending on where the bullet strikes, they are no longer the person we used to know. Their personality is radically different. Anyone who has known a person with Alzheimer's understands how a disease that effects the brain can erase a person's former personality, in a sense, killing the person we loved so dearly, leaving a body that on the surface looks like our loved one, but essentially is a different person, sometimes not recognizing who we are as if they had never known us, even ill treating us.
What implication does this have for any notion of an afterlife? A philosopher once said: "If we can be dead when we're alive (the complete loss of who we psychically are due to disease or injury), we can be dead when we're dead." In other words if physical damage to the brain can erase our personality, what makes us think that the physical damage of brain death and decay once we die is any different? It seems clear that there is no continuation of personality or awareness after death. It will be the end.
Someone once asked me, but what do you believe happens after we die? I asked them "what was it like before you were born?" Here is the answer.. It will be a radical nothingness that we cannot be aware of. Somewhere, sometime in the universe, a new consciousness will be born from a young mother.. the light at the end of the tunnel is in a sense the light at the end of the birth canal.. a new beginning.
